


The Madness of Solitude

by stylusmaleficarum (cygnes)



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: 17th century Dutch tulip speculation AU, F/F, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 07:22:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14563944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/stylusmaleficarum
Summary: The young mathematician Richard Hendricks devises a brilliant formula, and risks both his fortune and his heart in applying it to the precarious tulip market.





	The Madness of Solitude

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](https://stylusmaleficarum.tumblr.com/post/173405668412/nonnie-again-fic-prompt-36-still-stands-if-you) on tumblr, for a very loose interpretation of the prompt "living in a society where their love is taboo au." 
> 
> A "break" is when a single-color tulip is streaked with another color. This is caused by a virus (not known during the historical era on which this fic is based) and increased the value of a bulb exponentially during tulip speculation. 
> 
> This fic is very loosely inspired by the movie _Tulip Fever_ , which is way more bananas than anything that happens here. I also didn't do the research to accurately set this in 17th century Amsterdam, so it might be prudent to instead imagine that this is a historically-inflected fantasy in the vein of _Swordspoint_. The title is a riff on Charles Mackay's book about Tulip mania, _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_. (The book's accuracy in depicting the era is now disputed, but you gotta love those 19th century titles.)
> 
> (Some content warnings in endnote.)

On the day a body is pulled from the canal, Richard Hendricks leaves the city.

—

Does it begin, perhaps, when he starts working for Mr. Gregory? When he meets his employer’s young wife? When he meets his employer’s wife’s friend, a fellow foundling raised by the church — or when the abbess walks him to the corner of the convent garden where his fortune might be made?

Where his fortune might be ruined, too. Let’s not forget that.

—

Before the worst of it, there was this:

“Madam — uh, my lady abbess — that is —”

“It’s a courtesy title, Mr. Hendricks,” the abbess says crisply. “Bream will do fine.”

“Mrs… Miss? Bream.” Richard takes a breath to steady himself. The abbess looks keenly up at him, waiting. She does not have the saintly patience he had thought to associate with nuns. “I want to buy the lot of whites you sold to Gavin Belson two weeks ago.”

“They haven’t bloomed yet,” Bream says. “There’s no way of telling whether one or more of them will have breaks. And, anyway, you ought to talk to Mr. Belson. He has the deed of sale. The bulbs belong to him. I merely have them in my possession.”

“Oh, but I do know,” Richard says. He smiles — an expression that makes him look devious, so he’s been told. “I have an equation, you see.”

“An equation?” Bream says. “Do you mean to say you know when a tulip will break?”

“I do,” Richard says. “And I thought you might intercede on my behalf for that lot of whites if I shared it with the abbey. Confidentially, of course.”

“Let’s see your numbers, then,” Bream says. “And I’ll tell you what they’re worth.”

—

But before that: Jared. Jared standing in the study, by the window, diamond-shaped shadows from the leaded panes thrown over him like a net. He’ll die by inches without complaint.

Unless Richard does something about it.

—

And earlier still:

In a life where they had met differently, Richard might have fallen in love with Monica instead. As it is, there is a portrait of her and Peter Gregory hanging on the wall. He looks more severe than he is; she, less.

“He’s like a father to me, really,” Monica says, leaning over Richard’s shoulder to look at the accounts. “He already named his brother’s son as his heir, so he never bothers me about that. He married me because he wants someone to look after him, and who he can talk business with without worrying that our interests might be at odds.”

Richard is at a loss. “I’m sorry if you’re… lonely?”

“Not at all,” Monica says. “I have my old friends from the orphanage. They’re married or apprenticed, now, so I don’t have to go back to the cloisters to see them. One’s a dressmaker’s apprentice, another’s working for that dreadful Mr. Belson. And of course I have all my husband’s associates to amuse me with their calculations.” She taps the paper in front of him and he jumps a little, splatters ink from his quill on one corner. “Now, what does he have you working on?”

“Oh, just — shipping.” Monica raises her eyebrows. _Obviously shipping_ , she seems to say; that is where her husband’s fortune was made. “Figuring out the maximum efficiency for shipping different kinds of spices by weight and volume, in terms of what will fit without slowing ships down or, uh, cutting into space for necessary supplies.”

“Useful,” Monica says. “But what do you _want_ to work on?”

He tells her. Peter Gregory thinks in the long term, doesn’t invest in fly-by-night schemes like tulip speculation. Richard knows that there won’t be money in tulips for much longer, which is why they need to get in and get out _now_ with smart investments. After some consideration, Monica agrees it might be worth the risk. She’ll undertake it herself, with her own allowance. ( _It’s not as if he notices when I get a new dress_ , she says, _so he won’t notice if I wear the same ones as last year_.) But he’ll need someone who knows tulips to consult with him.

Gavin Belson is the man to see about tulips. Monica has met him and tells Richard that he has insufferable manners and is a cheat to boot. Luckily, she has the next best thing: Mr. Belson’s young assistant, one of her fellows from the orphanage. A personal friend of hers, who will meet with Richard as a favor.

Richard proposes to meet in a tavern or coffeehouse, but Monica says that will be impossible. Mr. Belson keeps his assistant shut up in the house more than Mr. Gregory does his wife. Richard will have to call on Donald when his employer is away.

It all feels a little sordid. Like they’re lovers meeting in secret. (Though they aren’t, not yet.) A ridiculous thought, made no less ridiculous by the overly obliging and conspiratorial attitude of Mr. Belson’s staff.

Donald is tall and slender, pale as skimmed milk and with the air of fatigue that comes from overwork or a delicate constitution. Richard wonders briefly if he is kept indoors for his health. His name, as it happens, is no longer Donald.

“I mentioned it to Monica in one of my letters, but that might have been one of the ones that wasn’t sent,” Jared-not-Donald says. “The politics of the house are very complicated.” He laughs as though this is normal. As though it doesn’t sound like he’s the imprisoned princess in some fireside tale.

Jared knows tulips from the business conducted by his employer, but also from personal experience. He worked in the convent’s garden before Mr. Belson hired him. (So he’s not an invalid, as Richard first suspected.) Most pertinently to Richard’s interests, he can trace the complex genealogies of the convent’s bulbs — can even correct some minor mistakes to the established record, which may make all the difference. They spend hours at it. The sun is going down by the time Richard thinks to be alarmed.

“Mr. Belson —” Richard starts, looking around as though the man will suddenly step from behind a curtain. Jared laughs. He laughs easily, however grim it all seems to Richard, which is admirable and a little unnerving.

“He won’t be home for another two days at least,” Jared says. “I can have something sent up for you to eat, before you go.” Richard thinks of the little garret he rents with several other young men of no consequence. What does he have waiting for him there? Dried sausage, a rind of cheese, bread halfway to stale, and a raw onion. Assuming that none of his fellows have gotten to them yet.

The roll he breaks in half to split with Jared is still warm. There is a plate of wilted greens and garlic, another of little fish with crisp skin.

“Patrice is sometimes my friend,” Jared explains, regarding the cook. “More so when Mr. Belson is away. He turns us all on one another, though I try not to get caught up in it.” Mr. Gregory ignores Richard unless he says something very stupid or very brilliant. It has annoyed him in the past. Now he’s almost grateful.

“Can I come back tomorrow?” Richard says. “I need — I mean, I _want_ — more data. If you have it.”

“As long as I get my own work done, I don’t see why not,” Jared says. He looks pleased.

So Richard gets two more days of tulips, of creeping up the back stairs, of food that sticks to his ribs and doesn’t make a reappearance on his walk home, as is sometimes the case, splashing down into the canal. Onto a duck, once. Not his best moment, but the only people who had seen it were strangers.

Jared, for his part, starts to look ill.

“Oh, well, I’ve had to sleep less to keep up with my own work,” he says cheerfully. Still cheerful. Horribly so. “I can sleep when I’m dead. Isn’t that the old saying?”

“I don’t want you to die,” Richard says foolishly. Jared’s earnestness has infected him in some small way.

“That’s very kind of you, Richard,” Jared says. He lays his hand over Richard’s on the table and smiles like he doesn’t believe what Richard has said. “I’ll write to you, if I can. Though, of course, if you have all your information…”

“Better not to have a, a written record of this,” Richard says. “I have enough to get started. But more detail wouldn’t hurt. It’d — help.”

“Mr. Belson has another trip planned three weeks from now,” Jared says. “I could see you then.” Three _weeks_! When every _moment_ counts in this market! But he really does have more than enough to get started.

“I’ll write to you,” Richard says. “Just to — to see how you are. In all this,” he gestures vaguely to the house, growing dark around them in the twilight. “If you think you’ll get my notes?”

“Bribery could be employed,” Jared says. “I’ll look forward to it.”

So then it’s the drudgery of shipping calculations, the bleakness of the garret. The other young men he shares the space with aren’t really scoundrels but they are insufferable. They invent a mistress for him, to explain his absence in the evenings: a married woman, of course. Dinesh and Mr. Gilfoyle agree that it couldn’t be Monica, who they have met and who they have deemed much too pretty and too sensible to fall in love with Richard. Rather, his lover must be very desperate. Middle-aged, snaggle-toothed, balding.

“If I did have a mistress, she wouldn’t be — like that,” Richard finally snaps.

“Then tell us about her,” Dinesh goads him. “Compose us a sonnet. A villanelle.”

“She’d be… sad,” Richard starts. Mr. Gilfoyle (who does not consent even to let his friends and co-conspirators call him by his given name) snorts in response.

“About settling for you,” Mr. Gilfoyle says.

“About how her husband turns the servants against her and then goes on trips and leaves her to fend for herself,” Richard says. He heaves the whole sentence out at once, too-fast. “About how he keeps her shut indoors,” _(like a princess in a fireside tale)_ “and barely lets her see her friends, even the other girls from the convent who are perfectly respectable, and, and —” he stops short, almost out of breath. Dinesh and Mr. Gilfoyle are staring at him.

“You’re not _really_ seeing Mrs. Gregory, are you?” Dinesh says after a silence that lasts too long.

“Mrs. Gregory is doing just fine on her own,” Richard says.

“Then our tragic beauty is imaginary,” Mr. Gilfoyle concludes.

Richard hadn’t said anything about beauty, but now that he thinks about it — maybe. Yes. There is something beautiful about Jared. Not the way that women are beautiful, or the way paintings or stained glass are beautiful, but. There’s something that puts an ache under his ribs when he thinks about Jared sitting across from him, or next to him, lit on one side by blue twilight and on the other by the fire in the hearth.

He works like a madman on his calculations when he should be working as usual. Monica makes excuses for him, does some of the weight-and-volume math herself to keep her husband from catching on. She has the mind for it; says she learned from the abbess, who’s as intelligent a person as she’s ever met. And she meets very intelligent people through Mr. Gregory’s business.

Too curious, Richard asks about the convent. About the orphanage. About her friends, most particularly.

“We were all together when we were young,” Monica says. “But the older girls were moved into the convent, with the idea that we’d take orders if no one wanted us. The boys are thrown out on their luck, if no one wants them for grooms or apprentices or what-have-you. Never seemed fair.” She tugs at the high neck of her dress and a button pops off. She goes on writing, not bothering to look for it. “Of course, it’s not fair that the rest of us are traded like goods at market, but there you are.”

“What — what do you mean?” Richard says, only half listening. He’s looking over what he’s done so far. Not done, but almost, almost…

“If someone wants to take us from the convent or the orphanage, they’re expected to pay,” Monica says. “If we have siblings, they’re to be looked after, educated privately. If we’re alone in the world, a donation must be made for the other orphans.” She looks up at him. An intense gaze, her collar undone — in another lifetime, that might mean something else to him. In this one, he’s in too deep with someone else. “My sister will be able to have anything in this world that she wants.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Richard says.

“You didn’t ask,” Monica says, and looks back down. Maybe not even in another world, then, with who he is. With how he is.

He makes it almost a week from his last visit before giving in and trying to see Jared again. Little redheaded Patrice must be Jared’s friend at the moment, because she makes him wait in the back courtyard and brings Jared down to see him.

“Is it finished?” Jared says. His voice is a hoarse whisper. Richard wonders if he’s been crying. If there’s anyone Mr. Belson is looking after for him, or paying for someone else to look after. Or if Jared is really alone, aside from friends he can only sometimes write to and can barely ever see.

“Almost,” Richard says.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Jared says. “When it’s finished, I want to hear about it. I’m sure I will, if it works.” He smiles. “Gavin will be furious.” _Gavin_ , not Mr. Belson. And then Jared turns his head sharply at a sound behind him in the kitchen, and Richard sees bruising green-purple-yellow under his collar. Jared might be a different kind of convent-bride from Monica, but he still might be that, in his own way. Richard’s head aches with anger. His stomach churns.

He leaves without saying goodbye.

—

And then the calculations are finished. Richard knows, or thinks he knows, what bulbs are most likely to break. What white blooms will suddenly be shot through with red, like bloody linen. What violet blooms might be streaked with white, or yellow edged in crimson. The abbess agrees. That’s the most important part, alongside whether the numbers are right.

He gets the batch of whites. He gets not one but two breaks in the batch. He sells them. He makes a fortune that could keep him for a few good years, even with the share he owes to Monica, and he thinks that’s the end. Richard has what he needs. If not what he wants, then at least what he want _ed_ , past tense. Dinesh and Mr. Gilfoyle and even their landlord Mr. Bachman drink to his health and to his wealth, as long as he’s paying.

The celebration lasts six hours. Then Gavin Belson has him clapped in irons and tried for theft.

—

The case goes nowhere, and anyway, it doesn’t matter. Even Mr. Belson can see that the market is too small, the sums too high. It will burn itself out by the time the law decides in anyone’s favor. And who would side against the word of an abbess, Mr. Belson excepted? It’s just enough to drag Richard’s name through the mud. To make him out to be the underhanded conniver and direct attention away from Mr. Belson.

After the proceedings, Monica consoles him. She’s aglow with triumph and something else. Richard comments, mumbles something indelicate about starting a family after all, and she laughs. Not at him, but at her own delight. At the depth and breadth of her own happiness.

“I’ve taken a lover, but there’s no danger of that. You remember my friend the dressmaker? Clever hands,” she says, and smiles in a way that looks nothing like the smile in her portrait.

Monica is investing most of her share in Carla’s new business. Richard wishes her happiness with enough of his own misery in his voice that she chides him first and then asks what’s wrong. It tumbles out in fragments, out of order. He might say something comparing Jared to stained glass after all. But Monica is very serious when he comes to the end of it all.

“If Jared tried to defend you to him,” she says, “if Gavin knows…” she shakes her head. Wide-eyed, worried.

Richard is off like a shot. He doesn’t make it as far as Mr. Belson’s house. There is a woman’s wail, echoing down the canal, and he knows already that he’s too late.

—

It’s another three months before Jared shows up on his new doorstep.

“Mr. Bachman is very protective of you,” he says. “It took a lot of trying to get your new address.”

Richard doesn’t quite faint, but it’s a near thing. Jared goes over that last day in the city as he pours water from a ewer into a little ceramic cup for Richard to drink. Gavin had threatened him, but did no lasting harm (and Richard’s mind catches on that, no _lasting_ harm). He had then stormed off in a rage, and fell into a canal, which was widely assumed to be an attempt to take his own life because the tulip prices had suddenly plummeted. It was not yet common knowledge that most of his stock had already been sold off. So Gavin had dismissed his staff and hired on a new one while he convalesced.

“He only got wet,” Jared says. “So what’s healing now must be his ego. That could be the work of a lifetime.” Richard manages a weak laugh. “And I almost forgot! A gift from the abbess.” Jared unfolds a parcel of paper and linen. A single bulb is nestled inside. “One of your whites. The new owner didn’t want them when the price dropped. Where would you like to plant it?”

“I’d only kill it,” Richard says. “I don’t know anything about tulips. Not really.”

“Well, I do,” Jared says. “So it will do just fine.”

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for implied violence (possibly sexual in nature), mistaken assumptions of murder and suicide.


End file.
